Writing Prompt Boot Camp, Day 14

Here we are at the end of the boot camp! This was far more enjoyable then I expected, and I think I may have unearthed a few characters and a few stories I would like to explore later. For now, please enjoy this tale of an odd homecoming. It does tie in to my current work in progress, but in a way I did not expect!

Loose Ends

One

Jennifer Montgomery Angle retrieved the keys to her recently departed Grandmother’s little house. She unlocked the door and let herself into the neat Cape Cod where her Mother was raised. Jenny closed the door and turned on the light.

Jenny had only been here once before, back when she was still in elementary school, but her memories of the place did not betray her. The house was as she remembered it: the short hall led straight to the kitchen, with the staircase running parallel to the hall leading upstairs. The living room lay off the hall through an archway on the left side of the hall. If you kept going through the living room you’d end up the dining room which connected back to the kitchen. The layout hadn’t changed a bit, but the rooms had changed.

The living room had been converted into Grandmother’s bedroom. The large medical bed still dominated the space; the sofa and easy chair given away over a year ago. Jenny entered the “living room” and set down her purse and backpack on the bed. She tucked her suitcase beneath. She’d bring it all upstairs when she settled into the guest room, which still held a bed. Grandmother’s housekeeper had come by the day before and freshened up the room for Jenny’s visit.

The smells of the house were mostly as she remembered, but there were some newer, medicinal, odors that were present but starting to fade. Jenny supposed that once she had the medical bed, and all of its connected equipment, taken away, those new odors would be gone.

Jenny pushed past the bed and entered the dining room. No China place settings and silverware on its surface, just piles of unopened mail. Most of it was “junkola”, as her Mother called it, but Jenny saw a few legal looking envelopes and assorted bills. Grandmother’s attorney, a nice man who had notified her of her Grandmother’s passing, had told her to gather up all of the important mail and drop it by his office later in the week, no rush.

“No rush,” Jenny said to herself as she gazed at the papers on the table. “No, no rush anymore.”

Jenny turned to the right and went to the kitchen. It looked all right, but Jenny knew that she’d have to make a run to Freddy’s for some basics. There would be no food in the fridge, only ice cubes in the freezer. There may be some canned goods in the cupboards, but it was even money that they would be past their sell-by date.

Jenny retrieved a glass and filled it with water. She drank it slowly, grateful for the cool moisture that refreshed her tongue. The arid airplane air had done a number on her sinuses and had never been more grateful for the gentle humidity of Spring in Oregon. She wondered if rain was on tap for tomorrow. She laughed at the question.

There was a knock on the front door, followed by the sound of the door opening. “Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?” somebody called in a cheerful, cautious tone.

“I’m in the kitchen, Ruth,” Jenny called over her shoulder. She refilled her glass from the tap and drank almost half of it down before Ruth joined her.

“Oh, my! Look at you, dear!” Ruth said as she advanced on Jenny. Jenny set her glass down and accepted the strong hug from the little woman. Ruth barely measured up to Jenny’s shoulders, so her head was buried in Jenny’s bosom. Jenny had to suppress a laugh, so she did so by hugging the older woman back.

“How was your flight?” Ruth asked as she let Jenny go.

“Fine, fine,” Jenny said. “I still feel a bit dried out from the recycled air, but I’ll live.”

The two women looked at each other, their eyes tearing up at the last word Jenny said.

“Well,” Ruth said, trying to regain some composure and get back to business. “Let’s get you settled in. I’ve got the guest room upstairs all ready for you. Do you have any suitcases?”

“I’ll take care of those, Ruth,” Jenny said. “I guess I’ll need to go to Freddy’s to get some food. Can you remind me where the closest one is?”

Ruth went to the small desk and chair that occupied a corner of the kitchen, right next to hall entrance. She produced a pencil and a notepad from a small drawer and wrote some directions. As she did so, she began to hum a tune that jogged a memory loose in Jenny’s mind.

“Grandma used to sing that while she made us dinner,” Jenny said in a soft voice. “She said she hated that jingle, but I think she loved it.”

“That she did,” Ruth said as she handed the slip of paper to Jenny. “Whenever I said I was going to Freddy’s to get a few things, she would start humming that old jingle. She could still hum it even after she couldn’t speak anymore.” Ruth’s eyes began to water. Jenny pulled her into another hug.

“It’s ok, Ruth, it’s ok,” Jenny said. Ruth wept softly and Jenny didn’t mind that she’d have to change her shirt before she went out for groceries.

Two

Ruth left thirty minutes later, insisting that she help Jenny get settled. Jenny took her bags upstairs and deposited them in the little guest bedroom, the same room she slept in during that long-ago visit.

“You run along to Freddy’s and get yourself some food,” Ruth insisted. “I’ll make sure everything’s all squared away by the time you get back.”

So, Jenny did just that. Catching a break in the weather, she followed the directions Ruth had sketched out on that small piece of kitchen memo pad and found the Fred Meyer grocery store. She went in with no list, no menus in her head. She just took one of the smaller carts and plunged into the store. When she emerged almost an hour later, she found she had enough stuff to cobble together more than a few meals for the next week or so. Heck, she could even host a small dinner party, if she had enough friends left in the area to occupy her Grandmother’s dining room table.

“Nuts to that,” Jenny said to herself as she loaded her groceries into the trunk of her rental car.

Driving back to her Grandmother’s house, Jenny’s thoughts turned to her Mother. Also named Jenny, her Mother was killed in a car accident when she was in college. It was an accident brought on by her Mother’s drinking, but nobody else was injured or killed, thank God. She remembered one of her hallmates knocking on her door to tell her she had a call: “There’s someone from the Milwaukee Police Department on the phone for you? I thought you were from Oregon, not Wisconsin.”

As she pulled into her Grandmother’s driveway, the words of the officer echoed in her head: “I’m sorry but I have to inform you that your Mother is dead.”

Jenny turned off the engine and sat in the car for a while. In time, a single tear trickled down her left cheek. She wiped it away and began to unload her groceries.

The rain started up again.

Three

Groceries put away, bags unpacked, and dinner consumed, Jenny found herself with nothing to do except the tasks she came here to do. Which she didn’t want to do. So she cracked open a book she brought with her to read on the plane. Looking at the cover reminded her why she had not read it on the flight. “You are the Mountain to Climb” featured a coal black cover with a jagged line that was supposed to be the outline of a mountain, but which looked like the profile of a shark’s tooth to Jenny.

“I wonder if it’s from the big one, a megalodon,” Jenny chuckled to herself.

The book was a gift from the coworker she was closest to, a woman named Sandra who was five years older than Jenny. Sandra meant well, of course, but right now the last thing that Jenny wanted to do was improve herself. It was still too early in the evening to go to bed, so she had to figure out something to do with herself. To the internet!

Two hours of doomscrolling on her phone while sitting at the kitchen table left Jenny in a worse mood. And now she really had to choose between to going to bed like a responsible person or staying up because she was an adult goddammit and isn’t that the point of being an adult?

“Ok,” Jenny said to herself,  “why don’t we peek in one closet then call it a day? Sound good?”

Before she could talk herself out of being responsible, Jenny turned out the light in the kitchen. She checked the front and back doors and then went upstairs. The landing split off into two short parallel hallways. The master bedroom and the full bathroom were on the left side, the guest bedroom and the storage closet on the right. Jenny turned right, tossed her phone and book onto the full-sized bed, and then turned her attention to the closet door.

Four

There was something wrong with the closet door. Jenny just knew it, like you know what kind of ground you are walking on. Jenny couldn’t tell what was wrong about it, so she racked her memories trying to picture the contents of the closet, but she hit a mental wall just like the coyote did in those stupid cartoons.

Jenny had never had a good look inside the closet. Why?

Grandmother had forbidden it, that’s why.

That realization brought another memory forth, hidden somewhere deep in one of Jenny’s own mental closets. She was a little girl, and she had just arrived at her Grandmother’s house. She was bored and still jumpy from her first ride in an airplane, so she went looking around the house for something to do. She poked around the little guest room where she was staying (then and now, Jenny thought), but she found nothing but old books and small photo albums full of black and white people that she didn’t know.

Her exploration led her to the hallway and then, of course, to the closet. Jenny hadn’t noticed the closet door when she first arrived but now wanted to know what was inside. Maybe there was something fun! Jenny grabbed the small glass doorknob and tried to turn it open. It was stuck, but she thought she could get it open with a little bit more effort. She grabbed the knob with both hands and turned. The door popped open with a squeak and a groan of old wood and hinges that had not been used in a long time.

Jenny beheld the closet. At first, she saw nothing of interest. A few boxes, some stacks of old sheets and towels. An open box on the floor of the closet that held containers of what looked like old timey cleaning products. Jenny bent down and pulled out the box so she could look at the stuff and marveled at the funny names: “BRASSO”, “20 MULE TEAM BORAX”, “FELS-NAPTHA”, and “MRS. STEWART’S LIQUID BLUING”. The smell that came from the box was a little sweet and a little sour, just sour enough to let Jenny know that she probably shouldn’t open any of these funny old bottles or boxes. She was pushing the box back into place when she saw another box behind it, shoved to the back wall of the closet.

The box was thin and rectangular. It looked like a game box!

“All right!” Jenny said in an excited tone that must have carried all the way downstairs.

“Jenny?” her Grandmother called from the kitchen, where she was preparing the meal she called “supper” and that Jenny thought of as “dinner”. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, Grandma,” Jenny answered. She had shoved the box of cleaning stuff aside and was reaching into the closet to get the game box. Her movements made the hardwood floor creak beneath her.

“What are you doing up there? Getting into trouble already?” Grandmother laughed. “You’re just like your Mother, I do declare!”

Jenny liked the sound of her Grandmother laughing. Maybe they would laugh together while playing this game. Jenny finally got a hold of the box and pulled it out of the closet. It was plain brown cardboard, with no pictures on the outside. She turned it over so she could see the front of the box. There was a single word printed on the lid in large, swooping black script: “OUIJA”.

“Grandma? What’s an O-U-I-J-A?” Jenny asked, spelling out the word she had no idea how to pronounce.

A crash came from downstairs, followed by a rush of footsteps as Jenny’s Grandmother ran up the small staircase. When she reached the landing and rushed toward her granddaughter, Jenny remembered that this was the first time in her young life that she ever saw an adult afraid.

Five

Now Jenny stood before the closet door, completely locked in place by the terrible memory of being chastised by her Grandmother as she snatched the Ouija box from her hand and stuffed it back into the closet. Grandmother closed the door and leaned hard against it, until the lock made a small click sound, making sure it was truly closed. She told Jenny to go downstairs and sit in the living room. Jenny did as she was instructed and sat on the edge of the couch for the next few minutes while Grandmother got herself back under control and cleaned up the mess she had made in the kitchen. They went out and got a pizza, Jenny never did find out what Grandmother had originally planned on making for dinner that evening.

The rest of the visit had been fine. The upstairs closet, and the Ouija box within, was never mentioned again. Not once over the ensuing years.

“Was that why I never visited again?” Jenny mused out loud. She was talking to herself quite a bit since she arrived here. Did she do that back home? Jenny didn’t think so.

“Was Grandmother mad at me? Or…” Jenny stopped speaking. She looked at the closet door and decided it was too late in the evening to open it up.

“Tomorrow,” Jenny decided. She would investigate the closet tomorrow.